Featured quite often on PfRC without realizing there was a special name reserved for them, tokusatsu examples are kaiju classics, superhero cartoons and the giant robot trope—among others. One of the genre’s chief hallmarks and probably constituting a whole sub-culture of its own is found in suitmation (スーツメーション) technology. Check out the links up top and treat yourself to a cavalcade of delights that it will be hard to escape from.
In an era before animation or interactive video, we found this German physical education manual’s use of double-exposure to capture motion and the steps of an exercise routine to be quite clever.
Looking a bit like an incarnation of Shiva, author Theodore Bergquist demonstrates various exercises through multiple super-positions based on a discipline developed by Pehr Henrik Ling, a medical doctor from Småland, who recognising the role that physical activity and preventative measures played in overall health, Ling conceived of a studio equipped with parallel bars, wall beams and the vaulting horse for daily practise. Bergquist above was also the director (Hofrat) of the spa retreat at Bad Wörishofen, also known for popularising hydrotherapy and the Kneippbad was developed here. As innovative as the pioneering Ling was, his association with the invention of Swedish massage is somewhat of a misattribution, with the term only existing in a limited Sprachraum and going by classical massage everywhere else, the standardised practise (to include tapotement—the word used for when they vigourous beat you) first described by Johann Erst Mezger, though Ling was the first to incorporate elements of Asian massage (awakening the subtle body or the nervous system) techniques and importantly lent the ideas of massage and exercise scientific credence.
In what’s shaping up to be a timely history lesson, NPR’s Planet Money presents an extensive study of the factors leading to the passage, the immediate consequences and legacy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 made into a pop-culture reference by the droning line of inquiry of Ben Stein playing a high school economics teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (previously). Economists, who to a man believed the schedule of tariffs to be a disastrous idea, concede that its enactment did not cause the Great Depression as those wheels were already in motion, but agree that it exacerbated an already bad situation and prolonged it, turning a trade war of retaliatory tariffs on imports and exports into an unqualified war.
With the gradual introduction of electricity and the automobile throughout the 1920s, globally but particularly in the United States, farmers suddenly found a significant portion of land freed up that was formerly reserved for growing feed for horses and other beasts of burden, which led to over-production and caused the government to intervene to subsidise prices lest the price of commodities becomes too depressed and there’s less incentive for domestic production. Once the government signalled its willingness to protect a batch of staple goods of strategic importance to the US, things escalated rather quickly with no one wanting to miss out on this opportunity and some twenty thousand goods securing an embargo that held foreign competition at bay. Though international response was immediate, punishing and predictable with countries raising duties on American exports astronomically, not buying US products and turning towards self-sufficiency, the practise carried on for two years until congress reversed the tariffs and conceding that it such an unnecessary economic blunder, they abdicated their role in negotiating trade deals and put that power solely in the prerogative of the executive branch.
Though perhaps only a cold comfort and little consolation to imagine how the same cadre that benefit for the present from these regulatory changes are also the ones who are behind the policies that contribute to global warming and sea-level rise and their ocean-front properties will be soon conquered by the waters, the state of Florida has enacted legislation that could potentially severely curtail public access to state-controlled beaches.
A seemingly innocuous change in wording that extends the property-rights boundary out a bit caught only by the fact that the bill contained a rider prohibiting municipalities from passing legislation to countermand state law will give hoteliers and other land owners greater power to control who trods over private holdings to reach what the wealthy cannot yet own outright. Despite the governor’s exuberance and confidence that the landed-gentry won’t abuse this gift and deny people egress, many mayors have protested that such a move will destroy the state’s tourism industry, tossing favour to only a few establishments catering to a particular clientele.
